Lie Down in Darkness (22 page)

“I tried my best,” La Ruth continued doggedly, in a pleading tone. “Mama she tol’ me if’n Sister Alberta had gone on down to de Little Boat Harbor to go by see Sister Moreen at de Crystal Auto Sto’——”

“Oh, La Ruth!”

“Yes’m.”

“Just don’t say anything else.”

“Yes’m.”

Helen sat down again, trying to summon up, out of her infinite weariness, strength, and the courage to face Carey:
he’ll no longer tell me about God or Milton. I know now about it all. I know. I’ll get by his silly, sweet persuasions.
…

“Get me my umbrella. It’s in the closet where the luggage is.”

“Yes’m.” The enormous buttocks reared before her as La Ruth bent down, the faded skirt hiked high, revealing fat mahogany limbs and the sandy crater of a vaccination scar. “Seems like it’s down here somewhere, if only I gets to it,” the muffled voice went on, and then, triumphantly, holding up the umbrella, and easing gradually erect with pain and fitful, forgetful mumblings. “Dis yere one’s black, too, like it should be. Mmm-hh, my back! Lookee yere, I’ll wipe it all off for you right yere with dis old rag. Dis is a real nice umbrella, Miss Helen.” And then down the endless tunnel of her mind, without tributary, where no thought could diverge or change, but only link with a sister-thought like elephants trunk-to-tail, she battened solemnly upon umbrellas and continued in a soft high voice: “Daddy Faith he got a umbrella dat he carries in his auto wid him ev’ywhere he go. Some folks say dat de stones on it’s real diamonds. I don’t know but——”

And moreover, she was thinking, he’ll say that this is an inhuman, low thing, unworthy of my place in the sun, before God. That I should be so cold. And when he called me this morning he was shocked: Oh, Helen I don’t know what to say. Oh, Helen it’s the saddest thing. Oh, Helen I know about you and Peyton. Oh, Helen you must come today. Anyhow. Well, for my sake, Helen dear. Oh, Helen, have you thought of Milton? Oh, Helen he wants you now. Don’t you see? Oh, Helen, salvation, it’s all you have, don’t you see? And oh Helen this and oh Helen that. And … oh hell!

Ha! Oh hell.

But what was this now? Somehow deflected from umbrellas, La Ruth had approached her, arms outstretched, miraculously contriving a new thought: “Lawd, Miss Helen,” she whined, “ ‘deed if I knowed yo’ misery I’d of come last night but Mama she didn’t tell me ’bout it till real late ’cause I was washin‘ clothes over at Mrs. Massie’s.” She paused, swallowed hard. And now, shocking Helen, echoing Carey: “Oh, Miss Helen, Mama she tol’ me dat what you need is Cap’n Milton back. Fo’ to keep you on dis lovin’ earth, ‘cause Mama say po’ thing now with yo’ chillun flown up to de bosom of God you needs to bide out yo’ days with a dear sweet man. Gret God, Miss Helen—” her voice rose and descended on the hot air, like a cello—“Mama say ‘take him back, take him back,’ ‘cause, po’ man, bein a man he’s de sinful kind and cain’t help it, an’ last night while she was here she heard de moanin and de groanin he made and it was de pitifullest sound in dis world, dat’s what Mama say.”

“La Ruth!” Helen arose, but the woman wouldn’t stop, grasping her convulsively, and Helen could feel the scaly calluses of her palm.

“Mamma say ever since you come back from up there where po’ little Maudie passed away, dat Cha’lottesville——”

Charlottesville. Oh, dear God, keep that out of my mind.

Still the hard callused clutch, and sweat—a Negro touching her. “She say ever since dat time you was fallin by de wayside yo’self and not seekin Jesus and all de jizzum run clean on out of you someways.”

“Get your——” Helen, startled, tried to pull away, but behind those greasy spectacles the eyes, always so full of muddled despair, had in them now, beneath a film of blood-flecked moisture, the shine of revelation: “Lookee yere, Miss Helen, I had three men run away from me. All my life I done what was right and all dis runnin’ away left me pretty near soured. Now come a day when my chillun flown off wid de angels and Gret God did I grieve, cryin’ all de time and I couldn’t move it was so hard on me, like I been clobbered on de head wid a hatchet. Den I would pray for de ‘Postle and if’n dat didn’t work for dear Jesus just to please send me my man back so’s I could git me my lovin’ even if dat was de onliest thing I could git.”

She halted and let her hand fall away. Helen watched her. La Ruth was looking out of the window, breathing hoarsely, and the glow faded from her eyes then; this brief effort to make Helen understand about love and death and men and such things had been too much for her. No memory could stir her now; as if the familiar veil had been drawn over her mind and eyes, her face became relaxed and dumb again: now most likely the years could issue up only a remembrance of backaches, fleeting spasms of love which meant nothing anymore, even in memory, the endless immolation. Almost. For her voice, this time in one last try, was wheedling and timid and high-pitched, and trailed off like water trickling down a gutter: “Mama says ever sence dat weddin’ you wouldn’t have no truck wid him. Like it was his fault or po’ little Peyton’s. Miss Helen, Mama says dat ain’t right. Take him back,’ she says, ‘take him back,’ for de Lawd’s sake——”

“Shut up, La Ruth,” Helen cried. “Be quiet!” And then, while the day itself seemed to be gathering huge, hidden forces at her back, like a tidal wave of heat threatening to pour over her, she rushed past La Ruth into the cooler hallway, saying aloud, “Oh, I can’t stand this! I can’t!” And again, “La Ruth, my umbrella!”

“Yes’m.” La Ruth followed her downstairs with thundering footsteps, and, below, Carey was waiting with his white straw hat in his hand and on his face a horrid little smile.

“Helen.” He held out his hand. “I’m so sorry. I’m——”

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t be.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t try,” she said, sighing. “Oh, it’s so hot!” And thought,
In
deed if I consider Charlottesville that will be all. Which is worse, past or future? Neither. I will fold up my mind like a leaf and drift on this stream over the

Brink. Which will be soon, and then the dark, and then be done with this ugliness
…

“Oh, it is hot,” he was saying, behind her now, “I’m so sorry, so sorry.”

“So sorry,” she repeated, bending over to adjust her stocking, which Carey noticed was exposed far above her knee, the thigh blue-veined beneath, spindly. He turned away, blushing.
Oh, dear God,
he thought.

“Helen, dear,” he said softly, “we’d better hurry. It’s almost time.”
How ugly she’s become. After everything. Like a ghost
. “We’d better hurry,” he said again, “it’s almost time.”

“Yes,” she said. She let the hem of her skirt fall and stood up.

La Ruth handed her the umbrella. “Take him back,” she said.

“I have an extra raincoat,” Carey said, “you can use mine.”

“Dear Lawd bless you,” La Ruth whispered, weeping, “take him back, like Mama say.”

“We’d better hurry, Helen dear, it’s almost time.”

Carey opened the door for her and she took his arm, clasping it to her side.

“By-by, Miss Helen.”

“I’ll see this through,” she said to Carey sternly, and then, peering intently into his eyes as they went down the porch steps: “The end is upon us. There’s no use to——” She didn’t finish.

What?
Carey thought. Against his wrist her hand felt thin and cold. Above them, as they got into the car, the sun, unwavering, passed its summit, sank toward the long afternoon.

5

T
HE
hearse and limousine had passed through the center of town and now, in the western outskirts, it seemed as if there would be little traffic on the highway which led to the cemetery, six miles away. This fact was a matter of considerable relief to Mr. Casper and to Loftis, also—though perhaps to a lesser extent. Loftis
had
to keep his mind off what was going to happen, and it was curious, he noticed, with what concentration he followed each stop, each turn of the hearse ahead as it passed the landmarks of the town, and with what dread he watched the hearse balk at the stoplights, smoke spewing from the hood. If the hearse broke down Loftis knew that he’d be unable to bear it. He’d have to run away, through the streets, crying out his agony at the top of his voice or, if it happened later on the highway, through the woods, the marsh, perhaps falling down himself, finally, in some thicket, to hide his eyes mercifully from the sun. As a matter of fact, there had been a ghastly moment when in the midst of the noon-hour traffic the hearse did stop, completely. It happened just as the two vehicles had blundered into a long line of cars drawn up behind a stoplight at Thirty-fourth Street and Virginia Avenue. There had been no reason for this, actually, because Mr. Casper had told Barclay, not once but three times, to take the less-crowded route through Niggertown. But here they were, utterly stalled. Barclay ground away on the starter, but the hearse didn’t move, and from all sides came the noise of car horns, irreverent and frantic in the noonday heat. At that moment an audible sound of despair had come from the limousine. It was as if the heat and the grief and the tension had all found a voice in the ferocious blatting of horns around them; and each person in the car also made a little noise. There was nothing maudlin about these sounds; they were too spontaneous, and they came from the very heart of pain: Dolly wept anew, Loftis gasped and covered his eyes with his hand, and Ella made a low sob or sigh, hard to define, which began low in her chest and built up on a soft, high, drawn-out note of grief ending on the word “Jesus.”

As for Mr. Casper, he said, “Damnation,” beneath his breath and got out of the limousine. Barclay emerged from the hearse, shaken and nervous, and a policeman came up, inquiring politely (he alone, it seemed, of all the pedestrians and motorists, had sensed the delicacy of the situation) as to what was wrong, and why, and could he help. It was fortunate, too, that he did arrive, for he was the one who got the hearse started. Barclay tried again, then Mr. Casper, and finally the policeman: it was an old trick, he murmured, that he had learned driving trucks with the Army in Italy. He was a young man, very sunburned and very efficient, and he merely depressed the clutch and pulled the hand throttle all the way out before pressing the starter, and the engine began to turn over nobly. Mr. Casper thanked him kindly, gave Barclay a dirty look and hustled back to the limousine.

Now on the highway things seemed a little better, and they rode on in silence. The pinewoods swept past; the sky was blue and brilliant, with thunderheads rising enormously on the horizon. Loftis had run out of cigarettes and he knew Dolly had some, but so much did he want to have nothing else to do with her—
nothing, nothing,
he kept saying to himself—that he refused to ask her for one, and only sat and suffered. Mr. Casper, it occurred to him, was not the type to smoke.

“Milton,” Dolly said, between her sobs, which had become continual now, “Milton, say something to me, honey. Come on, Milton, it’ll do you so much good to talk to someone. Say something——”

He said, “Shut up,” which she did, partially, and now the only sounds in the car were those of her soft, moist sobs and the rustle of Ella Swan’s skirts as she rearranged herself from time to time on the jump seat, her eyes raised to the roof as if in prayer. A fever rose at his brow, sweat soaked him as fast as the wind allowed it to evaporate, and he felt nausea rising inside, a green fountain. Like pictures strange thoughts burned in his mind, old stills from a magic lantern, and waves of weak, humiliating nostalgia, sad pictures that come at the edge of sleep:
Helen, Helen,
he thought drowsily,
my lost, my lovely, why have I forsaken you?
Visions white as sunlight, perfect as one flower, a gardenia, once remembered from a dance that never stopped till dawn, they came to him briefly, vanished, and he believed he slipped off for a spell, thinking of Helen dressed like a cat, bearing down on him with a knife: only it wasn’t a knife, it was something else, a flower or something, and they were in Charlottesville, and there was Peyton too, her lips pressed to his, saying Daddy Daddy Bunny dear, the globe revolving monstrously out of night into day again, turning and turning … He opened his eyes. Dolly’s hand lay wet and limp on his, her head was on his shoulder. The hearse had stalled. They were drawing up into a gas station and the sky was filled with smoke.

One Friday night in November 1942 Loftis had done two things which he had promised himself not to do. One of these was getting drunk. Had he known that the next day he was to make the drive to Charlottesville, he might have contained himself, although even this, he admitted later, was unlikely. A hangover, of the sort he had suffered from more and more during the past few years, tended to keep his mind, upon awakening, morbidly aloof from reality. On days like this, which was most every day, each object surrounding him (shoetrees, knobs on the kitchen range, his fearful razor) seemed to send out urgent, vaguely flippant tentacles of sight and sound which suggested that it was not
he
who existed at all: he was the inanimate one, listlessly humoring a queasy stomach, and these—tricky gadgets of metal and rubber—were possessed of thriving, noisy life and the power to drive one witless with anxiety. At the age of fifty he was beginning to discover, with a sense of panic, that his whole life had been in the nature of a hangover, with faintly unpleasant pleasures being atoned for by the dull unalleviated pain of guilt. Had he the solace of knowing that he was an alcoholic, things would have been brighter, because he had read somewhere that alcoholism was a disease; but he was not, he assured himself, alcoholic, only self-indulgent, and his disease, whatever it was, resided in shadier corners of his soul—where decisions were reached not through reason but by rationalization, and where a thin membranous growth of selfishness always seemed to prevent his decent motives from becoming happy actions.

Here, too, like a sore, dwelt the perpetual consciousness of the failure of his marriage. Sober or drunk, he usually managed to keep this knowledge well back from the forefront of his mind; only in the half-death of a hangover when his mouth was a blister, his head stuffed with mohair, his guts an unquiet pulp, would this knowledge erupt and seep into his awareness and paralyze him with the sense of some evil trickery, of soul-disease, of secret nastiness. Nothing could help him then, not even a triple bromide; he could only wait for the sunshine or wind gradually to disperse his worries, and for his mind, like the slow expanding pupil of an eye, to think bright thoughts of familiar pleasures, familiar consolations—Dolly, for instance, or, more often, Peyton.

Fifty years had left him the appearance of a gratuitous, if somewhat dissipated youngness. His face was lean and florid, and just a little flabby around the jowls. His nose had a slight uptilt which he thought peculiarly aristocratic, and possibly it was, except that it exposed the hair sprouting in his nostrils—which Dolly would soon bring to his attention and which he would begin to clip. Otherwise his body was in good form: he thanked God for the co-ordination which made him a fine golfer—a gentlemanly winner in the Virginia tradition, he nonetheless loved to win, and he would never have taken up the sport merely for the exercise. Whisky, however, had begun to affect his game.

This lingering vitality was partly responsible for the resentment he felt at growing old, for the murky, suspicious resentment he bore toward Helen. “I am a fool maybe,” he’d say to himself, or to Dolly. “She’s right, you can’t just uproot these roots. You know what it does to kids—” and passing quickly over this disagreeable thought—“but listen—I’ve got youngness in me yet. And she—her hair is getting gray, her face pinched with bitterness, or religion. That fruity preacher.” Helen took no pains to conceal her new interest from him, and the fact that it should come to this—her becoming, after all, old before her time, obsessed, a little weird—sent him off into spasms of quiet, ineffectual anger.

He might have known; thirty years ago he might have guessed it, during their ambiguous, frustrated courtship; something might have informed him then, but he had been young and stupid, and it was too late now for recriminations. What else could he do, except stay married? What else? That they had lived so long together anyway, was, he often thought sourly, a matter for record; yet, because he was an idler of the most accomplished sort (this he was aware of); because, set out on his own, he could never earn enough, he knew, to maintain his self-imposed, patrician standard of living—he was still dependent upon Helen. And she, as she said, “for the children’s sake,” upon him.

Even though this was not all. Yes. This was not all. For though their supper conversation was guarded, and so chilly that it seemed their breath must turn frosty on the air, there yet had remained beneath the mistrust and suspicion that enveloped both of them the tiniest germ, some memento each of them had unconsciously salvaged, that cautioned them to keep their voices down and remember, hush: listen—the aerial melody of departed gaiety, as fragile as the smoke from burning dance cards, candles, midnight fires, might still be heard, very sad and distant, if you closed your eyes and let the years fall away. They had never closed their eyes, but the sense of something small and winking and indestructible remained; they had attended concerts together, and church (he on Trinity, Ash Wednesday, Easter and Christmas), exchanging valiant smiles and greetings with those friends who suspected all there was to suspect about them, but who turned away with frowns of doubt: “Oh, I can’t believe there’s any trouble there. Look at the way he laughed at her!” And then, hidden from curious eyes, they would drive home together in mountainous silence, say polite good nights and go to bed—she in her room and he in his—and on at least two occasions which they both remembered their forefingers touched and twined together, embarrassed and tentative and somehow disembodied, like little vines, but fell quickly away, while they marched briskly toward their separate rooms, pausing at their doors to turn, not looking at each other but still back to back, heads cocked to one side, listening for the aerial muted strand of vivacious music that was to both of them familiar but not ever quite heard, and so forever lost.

They stayed with each other. It was a perverse, heartless business. For a while everything would go along smoothly, considering the circumstances. Loftis would keep Dolly skillfully in the background, thus in a way managing to have his love and a certain serenity, too, for he noticed that whenever—by lies and disguise or, more often, merely by a large show of acting “naturally”—he screened his affair from Helen, she was almost pleasant again to live with. They would listen to the radio together, talk desultorily about the war, and often she fed him sandwiches and coffee, or supper, on the nights Ella and La Ruth had off. But it was a heartless business for the most part, full of uneasiness and sudden, painful surprises. On certain days, either by a misstep, a revealing gesture on Loftis’ part, or for no actual reason that he could figure out, Dolly would loom large in Helen’s consciousness. He could always tell. Then she’d stop speaking to him and play with her garden, take Maudie for long lonesome drives in the car, or disappear at night (which gave him an opportunity for visiting Dolly) to see Carey Carr. Often she’d go to bed with an obscure ailment.

These times were for Loftis brutal and agonizing. They made him realize the precarious sort of life he was living and brought him closer and closer to the decisions he knew he would eventually have to face. And moreover, where these moments of confusion—as they often did—concerned Peyton, they left him shaken and furious, but even less able to act, like a bug wriggling upside-down on the floor. There had been last Christmas, for instance, in 1941, when Peyton came home from Sweet Briar for the holidays. That had been close to the end of everything, but not really. And why not? Lord, it had been those hats, he thought, those awful paper hats, which had made the season so grotesque and had finally clinched the issue. Crumpled tissue, purple and green, they had crowned Christmastime not with gaiety but with the sick hue of disaster, and long afterward they had given him dreams—floating about like gaudy sails in his consciousness. Actually it all shouldn’t have been that way; at least it hadn’t looked that way in the beginning. Here was Helen a few days before the holiday began, blithely energetic, hanging up wreaths and ribbons and tinsel bells. Fixing things up—she let it be known in an offhand way—for Peyton. Now wasn’t that surprising? he had thought. He just couldn’t figure her out. Maybe she was becoming normal again, for a time. But he was miserable for thinking it was odd: why shouldn’t a mother want to make her daughter happy?

During these first several college years, in the summers and during Peyton’s vacations, she and Peyton had managed to get on together with a minimum of friction: although they seldom wrote to each other, arrivals and departures were solemnized by kisses, they exchanged small gifts, and in general disguised their feelings, whatever they were, beneath masks of smooth feminine guilelessness. Loftis was aware that Peyton and Helen were not “close,” but he knew that there was a certain love between them—an abstract sort of love, perhaps, but love nonetheless. My God, naturally. That they were not “close” he attributed just to the obscure quirks in human nature, Helen’s unfortunate neurosis, or, more probably, some furtive and unnatural sorcery practiced by Carey Carr. Anyway, he had been glad, if surprised, to see Helen exerting herself—so long as it was
really
true that she was preparing the house for Peyton’s arrival on Christmas Eve. He had a few suspicions but he overlooked them. He glowed. Pearl Harbor had come three weeks before and was already half-forgotten: he felt that he could get an Army commission, perhaps a colonelcy, but that could wait. The season was filled with the odor of pine and cedar, as raw and heady as new-planed timber; there were eggnogs, dances, boisterous open fires; and old friendships, withered by the year’s mercenary hustle, flowered anew, unless one was caught kissing another’s wife too long beneath the mistletoe. His manner with Helen became fairly ingratiating, and he gradually forgot her; in the round of parties he even forgot Dolly, too, until she telephoned on Christmas Eve to remind him of his defection. He had instructed her never, never to call him at the house, but she had disobeyed—and at the wrong time. Ah, the horrible, chancy, luckless wrong time. At an eggnog party that afternoon, partly in honor of the new-born Christ and partly for Helen’s brother from Pennsylvania, Edward, a bluff, red-faced man who had made the transition from coal broker to Army colonel with no noticeable loss of stuffiness. He was stationed at Camp Pickett. Loftis hadn’t seen him for years and was peeved to note that he had got rid of neither his cavalier attitude toward Southerners nor his gruesome juvenile politics.